A sturdy, instructive, well-written book.
What a difference half a year makes—in this instance, in transforming Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War into a war not just to preserve the Union, but to free the enslaved as well.
Journalist and one-time West Point historian Brewster (co-author, with Peter Jennings: In Search of America, 2002, etc.) comes at this project a bit late, it seems. Much of his ground was covered by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005) and the film that grew from it, Lincoln, while the evolution of Lincoln’s views on slavery and emancipation is the subject of Eric Foner’s much deeper-reaching book The Fiery Trial (2010). Still, Brewster provides a highly readable, vigorously researched account of the fraught six-month period in which the Emancipation Proclamation came into being, which inarguably changed the course of the Civil War. Brewster opens with W.E.B. Du Bois’ aperçu, somewhat inaccurate but also somewhat on the mark, that Lincoln was an illegitimate, poorly educated Southerner whose championing of abolition was politically calculated. Whether accurate or not, Lincoln’s decision brought added resolve to the battle to restore the Union, adding equality to “the American ideal of liberty.” Brewster is particularly good as a close reader of Lincoln’s drafts of the document and their evolving intent: As he notes, Lincoln’s wording, “dull, careful, lawyerly, precise,” makes it plain that only the states in rebellion were subject to the law’s harsh judgment. The extension of Lincoln’s reasoning to the Thirteenth Amendment can clearly be seen in the documents and Brewster’s thoughtful elucidation, though that extension was by no means fait accompli. Brewster offers as an interesting counterfactual what might have happened had Lincoln’s initial proposals been adopted, introducing a gradual emancipation that would not have been completed until 1900 and that would likely have involved mass repatriation of freed slaves to Africa. Instead, of course, Lincoln turned his army into “an army of liberation.”
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9386-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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